Article
Magazine: Spring 2018
Looking at some of the avant-garde works in the Museum's collections, I also have reflected upon how contemporary art matters both conceptually and politically. I am thinking of the powerful photographic portraits of the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, in which she appears pushing her face repeatedly against a piece of translucent glass, thus underlining that all modern representations of women, including photographic ones, involve some kind of distortion. Land Mark (Foot Prints) by the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla... offers us another example of how some forms of art seek to affect the world in a tangible, tactical way, while partially remaining within the confines of art. The photographic series belongs to the long-term project Land Mark, which was concerned with the ecological condition of Vieques, an inhabited island off Puerto Rico used by the U.S. Navy as a bomb testing range from 1941 until 2003. The photographs are records of the traces left by activists when they trespassed a restricted military zone. The artists invited the local activists to design their own protest graphics, which were cast in rubber reliefs and attached to the soles of their shoes. By wearing the modified shoes, the protesters became walking printing machines that left temporary copies of drawings or texts on the sandy surface of the island.
Although the collaborative performance was ephemeral, it ultimately helped advance the activists' political goals. The photographs in the Museum, on the other hand, participate in an ambivalent signifying logic. They are both indexical records of a past political event reduced to a set of prints, and a self-referential meditation on the trace as an artistic medium and a mnemonic tool. In both Mendieta's and Allora and Calzadilla's photographic series, art matters because it not only creates a dissensus or disagreement regarding the fairness of a particular symbolic and political arrangement but also points to the possibility of a different, better future that we need to imagine.
Although the collaborative performance was ephemeral, it ultimately helped advance the activists' political goals. The photographs in the Museum, on the other hand, participate in an ambivalent signifying logic. They are both indexical records of a past political event reduced to a set of prints, and a self-referential meditation on the trace as an artistic medium and a mnemonic tool. In both Mendieta's and Allora and Calzadilla's photographic series, art matters because it not only creates a dissensus or disagreement regarding the fairness of a particular symbolic and political arrangement but also points to the possibility of a different, better future that we need to imagine.
